Daniel Lewin

Daniel Lewin (1970 to 2001) was an American-Israeli mathematician and entrepreneur who co-founded Akamai Technologies. Born in Denver, he grew up in Jerusalem, served as an officer in the Israeli commando unit Sayeret Matkal, and studied computer engineering at the Technion while working as a research fellow at IBM's laboratory in Haifa, where he led development of a processor verification tool. He moved to Massachusetts in 1996 for doctoral study at MIT. There he and his advisor F. Thomson Leighton developed consistent hashing, an algorithm for optimizing Internet traffic, and in 1998 the two founded Akamai on that foundation. Lewin served as the company's chief technology officer and a board member. He was killed on September 11, 2001, aboard American Airlines Flight 11, and is remembered by a square in Cambridge and a best student paper award at the ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing.